Matisse: Master Cuts

As a new exhibition opens at the Tate Modern, Rachel Spence traces the history of Matisse's cut-outs

La Chapelle du Rosaire, in the hilltop village of Vence, 10 miles north of Nice, is the last masterpiece of the great French artist Henri Matisse. Inside, he painted the tiled walls with an austere theatre of Christian figures. But the real protagonist is the light from the stained-glass windows, transforming mosaics of citrus-yellow algae and azure cactus leaves into effulgent jigsaw puzzles. On the afternoon I visit, the hues have the clarity of jewels: sapphire, emerald, citrine. Yet early in the morning, I am told, the green softens to a milky eau-de-Nil, while yellow conjures a tropical sun.

Unveiled in 1951, the chapel was designed by Matisse when he was in his eighties. Its modernity, which shocked many at the time, was the vision of an artist who knew that it was his last chance to push his imagination. Yet the chapel was also the fruit of a new technique. Too frail to paint without discomfort, he had cast around in the early 1940s for a method to express himself with no loss of power. He found it through cutting out painted papers.

For Matisse, the practice was a way of ‘making my colours sing without… rules and taboos’. The use of paper liberated him from the history of painting, with its lineage of Old Masters and discipline.

This spring, Tate Modern is devoting an exhibition to Matisse Cut-Outs, bringing together 120 of them, from the cover he designed for the arts magazine Verve in 1937 to his final efforts in 1953. Among them will be cut-outs for the chapel windows.

Born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in north-eastern France in 1869, Matisse had been travelling towards the découpages all his life. He exploded onto the Parisian stage in the early years of the 20th century as one of the Fauves – painters who used colour so forcefully, they were likened to wild beasts. By the 1920s, he had become the only painter in France to rival Picasso. Yet, unlike the Spaniard, who excavated his subjects to reveal their essences, Matisse was a master of surface, obsessed with unity between colour and line.

His canvases saw him hailed as Modernism’s prince of harmony, yet the act of painting was always a trauma. He once said that at the age of 70, he still felt the desire to murder someone before he started a picture. The cut-outs brought him release. He described them as ‘the graphic, linear equivalent of the sensation of flight’. When he carved, he entered a ‘cosmic space in which I was no more aware of walls than a fish in the sea’.

His early encounters with the medium were functional. Back in 1931, struggling to balance the rhythms of a mural, The Dance, for a Philadelphia collector, Albert C Barnes, he hired a house painter to cover paper sheets and asked his assistant to cut and pin them on the wall. Never intended to be part of the final work, the papers were a new way to explore colour, shape and architectural space.

For the next decade, Matisse would reach for his scissors when the structure of a painting defied him. In 1943, with the Côte d’Azur expecting Allied bombs, he and his longtime assistant Lydia Delectorskaya left the Excelsior Regina Palace in Nice, their home since 1938. They took refuge in Villa Le Rêve, a mansion in Vence. With his eyesight vulnerable, Matisse closed the villa’s shutters.

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Deprived of the light that had been his quasi-Vesuvian power, he started to cut in earnest. The result was Jazz: arguably the finest artist’s book ever made, published in 1947 by Tériade as a series of pochoirs (stencils). At Tate, not only will two early editions be on view, but also some of the original Matisse cut-outs, alongside the painter’s handwritten text. Most renowned is The Fall of Icarus. Both corpse and angel, the white figure floats against a black slab framed by midnight blue with daffodil-yellow stars.

The end of the war signalled Matisse’s moment to unleash his new work. He knew the cut-outs made ideal preparatory designs for mass-produced imagery, yet was diffident at the idea of the production process. ‘I know that these things should remain as they are,’ he said, fearing that they would lose their ‘charm’ when they were reproduced. Some works, such as the Blue Nude series of 1952 – three of which are in the Tate show – remained in their paper incarnation. Others were surrendered to make way for books, ceramics, stained glass and screen prints.

Yet those last years saw Matisse devoted to his own inner deity. For days he sat in bed, paper blooming from his fingers, while a team of indefatigable assistants pinned them around his walls.

In his quest for rhythm, tempo and contrast, he referred to cut-outs as similar to music and dance. In a final interview, he compared himself to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe as he played a Mozart sonata at the end of his life. ‘It seemed as if only the essence of each musical phrase remained. He appeared to be playing for nobody but himself.’

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